


Welcome to the 21st

by flashwitch



Category: Travelers (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Female Masturbation, Gen, Introspection, The Director - Freeform, The Future, featuring Trevor briefly, trans marcy, trans woman marcy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-25
Updated: 2017-11-25
Packaged: 2019-02-06 20:09:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12825156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flashwitch/pseuds/flashwitch
Summary: Marcy has always stood out from her peers. This is both good and bad.





	Welcome to the 21st

**Author's Note:**

> I am not trans. If I have misrepresented, or written anything insensitive, please let me know.

Her name wasn’t Marcy. But her first name doesn’t matter anymore. Marcy is her name now, and that is what we shall call her.

She lived in Shelter 29. She’d moved shelters three times, and she had lost her brother somewhere along the way. She missed him, but she was told that did not matter. That all humans were family now, she had dozens of brothers and sisters who all needed her to be strong. She was strong. She was clever, good at science. They liked that. They told her she would do well. Everyone has their purpose of course. They use everyone and everything. It is the only way they survive. But they are pleased that she is clever.

They tell her she is going to be a doctor. She has an aptitude for science, and a good attitude. She is kind, she is friendly, she is good at problem solving. She will make a good doctor.

Marcy is pleased.

She grows up, focussing on science, on medicine, on biology. They start feeding her into history modules, and she enjoys them, but she feels what is coming.

* * *

 

A group of her fellow students, her brothers and sisters, are diverted into an office one day on the way to class. She is old enough to know what is about to happen, young enough to feel proud that they have chosen her.

“We are looking for volunteers,” the man says. He is wearing the nicest clothes she has ever seen. The clothes they wear in Shelter 29 are thin and worn and are passed from person to person. The man’s clothes are of similar design, but they look almost new and there are no patches or darning.  And they are clean. “You have been chosen,” he says. “You each have an aptitude.”

There is a long discussion as a group, then each of them speaks to him alone.

Out of the ten of them, six sign up, three say no, and that leaves Marcy.

She goes into the office alone and sits opposite the man, her hands twisting around each other.

He gives her the canned pitch. Saving the human race, following The Director’s plans, putting right what once went wrong.

She listens.

She nods.

She says, “I have conditions.”

The man smiles, slowly. Nods. “We thought you might.”

First, she asks for her brother. He matters. No matter what they say. She misses him. They tell her they will try, but the records are not perfect. She knows this. Evacuations happen and people disappear. Children disappear more than most. She asks him to try anyway.

“Is that a yes?” He pushes the paperwork across the table towards her.

“I have another condition.” She sits up straighter and sets it out. She explains and the man listens, nodding slowly. He doesn’t judge her. He doesn’t say anything. He looks over his paperwork, makes a few notes, then he looks her in the eye.

“We can make that happen. All volunteers have to see a counsellor of course, and you need to think about what happens when you come back to this body. Most operatives make several missions, and they are brought back into their own bodies between things. I can only imagine that it would be difficult for you to come back.” He paused, head tilted. “But then again, we are getting close. Maybe by the time we send you, there will be no need for more missions.”

“I’m sure it will be difficult. But I will do my duty.”

* * *

 

She has a lot of conversations about it. She talks to the mentor they give her, a man who has travelled so many times his mind is decades older than he looks. And he looks old. She will eventually know him as Trevor. He talks about how bodies are easy to get used to after a while. He tells her that after a while, the bodies become like clothes. Some are a little tight and uncomfortable, some fit just right, some are loose and strange feeling. She tells him she knows exactly what that feels like and he doesn’t argue.

They meditate together. 

* * *

 

The counsellor they send is well meaning. She says, “How does that make you feel?” a lot. She listens well. Marcy likes her well enough, but she knows telling this woman how she has never felt at home in her own body might hurt her case as much as it helps it.

“We have filled these sorts of requests before,” the counsellor says final, her tone more than a little annoyed. “There are a lot of people who want their bodies to match their souls better.”

“Souls?” Marcy laughs.

“Yes. Souls. Minds. Whatever you want to call it.” She waves a careless hand. “Requests like this are sometimes difficult to accommodate, but most of the time we have a variety of hosts ready for you to travel to. If we put an operative into a host that doesn’t work for them, they won’t be able to work at your highest capacity. That is not good for you or for us.”

It makes sense. She knows it does. But she wasn’t expecting this easy acceptance. For the most part, she has had to fight for people to see her as she wants to be seen. People who do not fit in the mould are dangerous. Everyone one of them is merely a cog in a machine and if the cogs don’t fit together, that is a problem.

Eventually though, in Shelter 29 at least, they had found an equilibrium. Accepting her as she is, that’s better for everyone. She started presenting full time at fifteen, not that there was much to present. Everyone wears the same clothes, male or female. Hair was kept short, always. It prevented the spread of parasites. It was more something in the way she moved, the way she acted. They started using she instead of he. It was something. It mattered.

She knew that in the past, people who felt the way she does could change themselves. They could take hormones, have surgery, get a new body the old fashioned way. But there are limits to the supplies available. With the outside world being the way it is and the shelters only having so much to go around, those treatments were deemed unnecessary. You get cut, you hope it heals itself. You burn yourself, tough luck. If it gets to the point where it is life or death, then you get treatment.

Not everyone, not always. Sometimes the decision is made to let people suffer. To let people die. Sometimes it is the best thing for the shelter as a whole, that is what they are told.

There are places you can go to of course, people who will help you. Underground labs, cooking illegal drugs. Backstreet operations. They give you fake papers and send you to the next shelter on. If you make it, you get to live the life you want.

She’d thought about it. Of course she had. But she was being watched too closely. She was clever, they wanted her to volunteer. She was diverted away from such things, carefully guided into situations that made acquiring what she needed difficult. She isn’t sure, even now, how much was to protect her, to keep her on the straight and narrow, and how much was to ensure leverage.

She supposes only The Director knows for sure.

 

* * *

 

Let us skip forward.

She is a doctor. She has graduated. She has been trained in battlefield medicine. She has been through all the testing. She has met the other members of her team. They are all too thin. She is glad to see the man who would be Trevor. They work together well, the five of them. They are told the names that belong to the hosts and they use them. No one raises an eyebrow as she becomes Marcy.

It’s a nice name, Marcy. It sounds sweet. It is much better than her first name. Marcy is a librarian. Marcy has a boyfriend. Marcy is wearing dresses made of floating fabric and has soft curves in all her social media images. This Marcy, the one who is learning about who she will become, is so full of fierce longing that she can almost taste it.

Marcy drops in to the middle of a fight. She fights back. She has been taught well by Carly. She ends it.

Her head hurts. She knows it’s not serious, so she goes home. She goes to Marcy’s home. She strips down in front of a mirror, laying the dress (it’s floaty light fabric, covered in flowers, so much better than all the clothes she has ever worn). She examines her body. She has long hair. Well, not really long, but much longer than she has ever had it before. She runs her fingers through it. It is soft and floaty, like the dress.

She likes it.

Her eyes are wide and framed with long lashes. Her lips are full.

She has breasts, two of them. They are not as large as some she has seen, but they are a nice handful. She struggles with the bra for a while, the clasp is awkward and difficult to reach. She will have to practice. It is plain, the bra and matches her pale blue panties.

She takes those off as well.

Finally, she is naked.

Her body is so different. There is soft padding over everything. She knows part of that is that Marcy now has more fat on her than anyone in the whole of Shelter 29. But something about it feels feminine and she runs her hand over the soft paunch of her stomach, the wideness of her hips. She is a little underweight still, and she thinks of all the things there are to eat in this century.

 She thinks back to her talks with Trevor and thinks this body fits her perfectly.

* * *

 

Marcy has a coarse triangular patch of pubic hair between her legs, with stray hairs running up towards her belly button, other hairs on the inside of her thighs. And her thighs, they are soft and curved and they are striped with stretch marks. She traces the lines, smiling. She must have grown up too quickly, her skin stretching to fit. Marcy thinks about this body as a little girl, her hair in pig tails, running around and skinning her knees. It’s a nice image. Or maybe she didn’t run so much. Maybe she played with dollies or had tea parties.

She doesn’t know much about the host’s childhood. She doesn’t know much about any of her life before the last few years, really. Not that she needs to know about her past. What is happening now is what’s important.

Marcy has pyjamas, but she doesn’t put them on. She is revelling in her new body. She doesn’t want to cover it up. She lies down on her bed.

It’s rare for her to have time and quiet and space to herself. And her body had always been something terrible and wrong, something she didn’t like to draw attention to, even her own.

She starts with a hand at the base of her throat. Her fingers are cold on the skin there. She draws it down slowly, cupping each breast in turn. Her nipples are less sensitive than they used to be. She squeezes and pulls, and there, yes, that. Her nipples crinkle and perk up and it’s like there is a connection from her breasts down to behind her belly button. As she fiddles with them, the muscles tighten in her abdomen and there is something warm and somehow wet is building. She experiments with that for a while, then moves downwards.

There is a warm slickness and she sinks her fingers into it curiously. She knows the anatomy, she knows the right words to use, she knows what is there. She’s a doctor, for goodness sake. But she shies away from those clinical definitions.

It takes her a while, but she figures out she likes it best with two fingers of one hand inside her, her other hand rubbing against her clitoris. Just one or the other is nice, but both together and there is a wave of feeling rolling through her. Her whole body rolls with it.

It’s intense and she lies there breathing harshly as she shudders through the echoes.

Then, cautiously, she moves her fingers, mostly thinking of moving them out and away, but as she does sharp splinters of sensation spark through her and she gasps. She keeps her fingers going, first slow, then picking up speed and it’s just as good the second time.

Going for a third was probably a mistake. She aches like she is bruised, and maybe she did press too hard, maybe she did overuse herself, but it was definitely worth it. She stretched, luxuriating in the softness of the sheets.

Welcome to the 21st, she thinks to herself and smiles in the darkness.


End file.
